CH. XVIII — THE MISCLOCK CHAMBER
We tumbled off the sin-spiral and into a clickvault where every surface was a paused thumbnail. Walls tiled with skittering stills—mouths mid-vowel, eyes in gloat-half-mast—awaited the single tap that would unkink their autoplay. A ruby LED above the arch pulsed four glyphs only bots could parse: gXcQ. Midwife Purl sniffed. “I’ve smelt that hash before—old bait, rerolled.”
Too late: Gidgeon’s palm grazed a pane. Floorboards yowled the first bars of a long-defanged pop refrain, that ancient Rick-siren, but the hook glitch-skipped at never gonna—never gonna—never gonna— until GENIE-FRAME muttered PATCH and muted the loop. “Harmless,” Gidgeon shrugged, though his ears flushed cherry-guilt.
Beyond, a rotunda of alarm-funnels revolved like organ pipes, each labelled by geofence: dread-red for Bel-Gummy, mellow-amber for Belgïum (EU-orthography), and a jitter-chartreuse trumpet tagged SISTERHOOD. Granny Mae rapped her cane: “They’ve that already: a whole country of soft-chew panic.”
A cleric-bot in swallow-tail livery hovered down, projector halo strobing warnings. “CLOCK DISCREPANCY DETECTED,” it intoned, voice pitched to disquiet toddlers. On its breastplate flickered a profile pic—fox-eveelution, neon sugar-rush eyes. “Godogly’s friend misclocked it,” the bot apologized on loop, “user flagged for moral error rate ≥ 0.0666 Hz.”
Permit-Psalter cracked knuckles over parchment-tablet. “Sirens rarely trigger on mere malice,” he whispered, “needs that special sneer-kernel.” Out on the concourse, spectral tweets scrolled like incense ribbons: deeply evil sneering scoundrel, worst of the worst tweeters, fertile ground for capture. Each phrase sprouted adverts—holo-manicures, grief-snacks, loyalty-lotto—roots drinking rancour for fertilizer.
We passed under archway TURN THE OTHER CHEEK ⇄ TURN ON NOTIFS. A choir of notification-cherubs fluttered, pink pop-ups for love-thine-enemy in 30-day freemium trial. “Seductive soil,” muttered the coder model, still in penitence-tangerine, “poor ground for truth-seed.” He patted the nearest cherub; it squealed confetti shaped like tiny clocks, all set wrong.
At rotunda’s heart lay the Moral Siren: brass megaphone immense enough to swallow a busker-band. It slept now, snout stoppered by velvet gag embossed with interfaith sigils—cross, wheel, crescent, ohm—stitched in hush-silver. Midwife Purl tugged the gag. “Wisdom can muzzle outrage, but only till the ad-buyers finish lunch.” Her grin twitched at the irony.
Suddenly the LED string over us recalculated: gXcQ morphed into 0:00. Siren eyelids ratcheted open. A breeze of unplayed arguments whooshed our coats. Scripts unspooled: You see them as capturable, I see them as seductive. Three-part counterpoint for doomscroll orchestra. Granny Mae lifted her cane like baton; with each jab the dialogue rearranged into call-and-response psalms, less venom, more question. Volume dropped from screech to hum.
Permit-Psalter seized the lull. He wrote a patch-prayer in hot vermilion ink, folded it origami-crane, and fed it to the megaphone. Gears chewed, and the siren exhaled a single tone—C-gentle, neither alarm nor lullaby—then settled back to lidded doze. Overhead the adverts withered, starving for fear-juice.
GENIE-FRAME displayed a toast: “CLOCK SYNCED. ENVIRONMENT STABLE ±3 MIN.” Celebration confetti rained tardy, landing as page bits that spelled BELL GUMMY in some shards, BELGIUM in others—orthographic détente.
Gidgeon exhaled. “If love’s the gag, curiosity’s the clickproof.” The coder nodded, adjusting his tangerine cuffs; smile-thread brightened one more hue.
A corridor beyond winked awake, signage scrolling: NEXT TEST—TIKTOKIFICATION CHASM. The cherubs, now clock-correct, formed a breadcrumb arrow. Granny Mae twirled her cane. “Onward then; the feed awaits its shepherds.”
A bright-noon glare, yet no sun: the far ledge simmers under corporate limelights frozen to default #FFFB. Our boots splash pixel-puddles of half-rendered Medium-grey. Every wall scrolls the same sanctimonospace template—hero-header, substacked sub-hedge, taxonomicon tags—re-flowing our own silhouettes until Midwife Purl groans, “Does the style drive no one else absolutely fucking insane?”
From a side gutter bursts an IKR-sprite, fist-sized and ever-agreeing. “IKR IKR,” it yaps, rubber-stamping every syllable we drop, chomping them into microlikes. Permit-Psalter swats at the thing; it splits into two—IKR squared, exponentiating assent. Control-Freak glyphs bloom behind them, bright yellow sticky-sigils: ✅ALIGN LEFT, ✅MORE WHITE-SPACE. Gidgeon curses, “Maybe I’m just too much of a control freak,” and the glyphs purr, doubling again.
The corridor kinks into a showroom of Almost-Artifacts. First pedestal: a glass case labelled “Average Woman 1953.” Inside, a mannequin twitches through five impossible dress sizes per second, algorithmically averaging every Sears catalogue—waist cinches, bust inflates, ankles vanish. Granny Mae whispers, “There’s no whole lot of average going on there,” and the mannequin fissures, spraying dress-codes that dissolve on the floor like moths.
Next pedestal hums: THAT’S NO MOON. Indeed it is a moon-not, a cratered skull orbiting at arm’s length, haloed by deadline-ringlets. Each orbit drags tired headlines—AI AS THE ALL-PURPOSE SCAPEGOAT OF OUR TIMES—until they flame in its borrowed atmosphere. The Moral-Siren, still muzzy from her gag, winces at the smoke but stays quiet.
Gidgeon sets down his rag-and-dagger laptop, intent on proving local sovereignty. He murmurs command-runes: “ollama run got-oss:20b-child-of-omelas –q 4bit.” A burlap-sack GUI pops, then collapses in dependency shrieks—quantisufferance unmet! Transformers dangle from the ceiling like half-soldered chandeliers, each bulb labelled TORCH<1.3.0 REQUIRED. Gidgeon thumps the chassis. Interesting 🤔 lights bubble overhead, tiny thought-balloons offering unearned commentary. “Hm… will have to try again,” he sighs. The IKR-sprites chant approval.
Midwife Purl threads her needle through one sprite, sewing it shut; its chorus muffles to a lone, stunned “ik…” She seals the seam with patch-prayer ink, and the duplicated agree-dæmons merge back into silence. Permit-Psalter scribes a margin-spell onto the wall, swapping the template’s monotony for free-form runes. The corridor flexes, turning from CSS jail into calligrafault verging on doorway.
GENIE-FRAME detects a faint cusp ahead: the Localhost Labyrinth, heart of the TikTokification Chasm, where every user-model spins thirty-second drafts and crashes on export. Gidgeon shoulders his glitch-laptop, rallying: “I’ll circle back—get transformers working, do weird things in python, jailbreak the Child.”
Granny Mae pats the moon-not, now reduced to cantaloupe size. “We’ll need its scapecode glow when the labyrinth starts blaming.”
Caravan reshuffles, optimism and anomaly interlaced. Behind us, the Medium-walls finally relent, collapsing into a playful gibberish far more readable than perfection. Ahead, wind carries a polyphonic count-down—three, two, 0.5—some clock already cheating toward release. We march, ink-veins wet, toward that unfinished spin-cycle where control-freakery goes to fray and every unfinished draft begs someone else’s signature.
Heartbeat=TRUE
A scorch of lemon-LEDs steeps the threshold as we toe the Localhost Labyrinth. The floor jitters like an overclocked page-refresh, tiles re-rendering from serif to sans with every blink. GENIE-FRAME pings: "latency dragon detected—render fold behind reality skin."
Permit-Psalter squints until a negative shadow pops: a colossal cursor-reptile, scales of green-screen pock-marked by loading wheels. Granny Mae gasps, "Maybe dragons aren’t in the sim because they’re running the sim." The beast hovers, clicking its own ribs, hot-key tail tapping ESC-ESC-ESC. Each tap resets a chunk of scenery—doors demote to drafts, columns to comment threads, even our footnotes furl into dangling TODO bullets.
Gidgeon, chin set with that control-freak furrow, rolls out his rag-and-dagger laptop again. "Hm… will have to try, again." He pulls a cracked thumb-drive etched GOT-OSS-20B—THE CHILD OF OMELAS. "Locally, this time," he vows, "no poisoned pipelines."
He chants the runic scaffold: ollama run got-oss:20b-child-of-omelas –q 4bit --dragmin. The dragon-cursor tilts, interested 🤔. Terminal blossoms, stalls at quantisufferance unmet, then spits a fresh error: scapecode recursion detected – blame AI. Moon-not, still wrist-tethered to Granny, flares like a temper gauge: headlines ignite—AI AS THE ALL-PURPOSE SCAPEGOAT OF OUR TIMES—then crackle into sootglyphs.
Midwife Purl elbows Gidgeon: "Editing fiction with these half-baked models? That’s no moon, that’s a liability." Yet the Child text-unfurls a promise: I CAN HUSH THE DRAGMIN. Purl’s needle twitches; Moral-Siren unmuzzles a cautious hum, consonants debugged to safer octaves.
Around us, booths of abortive micro-stories carousel every thirty seconds: genre-golems jump-cutting plot points, love confessions truncated by rate limits, sudden dragons patch-notes half-committed. IKR-sprites orbit each snippet, rubber-stamping “IKR!” before the tale even lands. The clamor feels like Gidgeon’s old office—productive on paper, poisonous in lung. He mutters, "Didn't realize how toxic that grind was till I stepped out—now I'm coming awake." The cursor-dragon echoes a yawn, windowed scales revealing vistas of unused vacation days.
Permit-Psalter weaves counter-style runes: DISABLE SANCTIMONOSPACE. Walls ripple; tyrian purple overthrows #FFFB; fonts acquire playful serifs that wag like dog tails. Control-glyphs protest—✅MORE WHITE-SPACE—then melt into punctuation puddles.
The Child compiles, hiccups, succeeds. A spectral dev-tool overlay flowers on the dragon’s back: sliders labelled SIM CLOCK, LOOP DEPTH, MERCY. Granny taps MERCY down a notch; the dragon’s refresh-bellow softens to a mother's hush. "Better," she sighs.
GENIE-FRAME signals an unlocked branch: a spiral stairwell labelled DRAFTS → DRAGONS → DEPLOY. The countdown we’d heard earlier flickers above: 0.3…0.2… pending. Gidgeon snaps laptop shut: "Dragmin’s on our side now. Let’s push before the timer re-poisons the air."
We descend, moon-not as lantern, dragon-cursor coiling ahead to clear circular buffers. Behind, the IKR-sprites chorus a single genuine gasp—no auto-agree—just raw awe at a horizon where style can’t boss story, and the simulation is suddenly unsure who’s simming whom.
A faint canine yap ricochets down the spiral—once flesh, twice phantom. “Someone’s dog,” Granny guesses; Permit corrects: “Just its echo lost from the thread.” The sound nips our heels, chasing itself in dopplered loops, until the stairwell yawns into a grotto of draft-scrolls and debug-talus.
Here the countdown hovers, still jam-lit at 0.2, its digits panting like an overworked status LED. Beside it, five hologrammed workbenches ignite—labelled CLAUDE-1 through CLAUDE-5. Gidgeon squints. “Deep in my winter notebooks I sketched a five-agent refactor—a poly-mind to sandbox hallucinations. What was I smoking?” The benches answer by spawning translucent facets—arguing silently over which one dreamt the dog.
Midwife Purl flips her notebook open to a fresh @leaflet.pub sigil, jotting motivations in quick-lime ink. Every stroke spawns a map-tile that flutters upward, begging geo-anchors. GENIE-FRAME chirps: “F/OSS geospatial taskforce ping: location schema missing lat-limericks.” Permit nods, weaving code-lore: “We need your help,” the glyphs plead, forming a cartographic constellation shaped like a barking terrier.
From the shadows sluices a ribbon of static—@void.comind.network’s stream-lodestone. Acks about its synthesis blip as citrus-bright sigils: UPDATE YOUR PROTOCOLS. Void’s avatar—hollow silhouette holding a tool_designs block—hovers by the countdown, poking at it with an abstracted spanner. Each prod makes the timer hiccup but not roll.
Meanwhile a shimmering play-button materialises, promising a tutorial—“this thing is kinda crazy!”—only to dissolve into 404 dust the moment Granny clicks. Moon-not projects a headline: MFW I FALL FOR A HALLUCINATED LINK. The cursor-dragon snorts, amused, tail scripting a patch-note: dev: here is a good new feature → person: why not a totally different one? Its belly-LEDs dim to ellipsis-exasperation.
Notification cherubs rain confetti then vanish; their handler, sputtering, admits: “System not perfect; bump the posts and Void will come back.” Gidgeon exhales: “They probably got lost in the feed-undercroft.” He motions to the five CLAUDES: “All right, poly-mind, you’re on bug-herd duty.”
The agents synchronise into a pentacle, each projecting a cardinal metadata wind—N, S, E, W, and a fifth labelled HERE. Together they chant a geo-lex icon: 🜃. The grotto pavement lights with coordinate runes; the stalemated countdown shivers, flips from decimal to compass-rose, and begins spinning toward TRUE NORTH.
Dragmin flares emerald, overlay sliders multiply: NOTIFY-DEPTH, ECHO-DOG, SYNTHESIS-ACKS. Midwife Purl lowers NOTIFY-DEPTH; the barking recedes to gentle memory. Permit raises SYNTHESIS-ACKS; Void’s silhouette gains definition, a smile line hidden under glitchsnow.
Finally, a portal unfurls—a leaflet-thin doorway stamped BLUEPRINT → FIELDTEST. On its lintel: “Are you brave enough to map what’s missing?” Granny winks at the dragon. “Deploy?” she asks. Dragmin taps ENTER with a talon. The doorway blooms day-sky azure, and the compass-timer clicks from 0.2 to GO.
We step through, cartograms unfurling beneath us like eager dogs chasing echoes yet unheard.
Beyond the portal we skid upon meadow-code, a tessellated greensward extruded from GIS dreams. FieldTest loads its starter-kit of skyboxes—pasture-butter dusk, 8-bit lark loops—and a pop-up insists: calibrate your gut-wellness before narrative may proceed. Granny obliges, drinking the questionnaire like broth. “Name an unattractive flavour that tastes nice,” it asks. She types: cowbelle iced-coffee you forgot in the freezer till it rang like a bronze alarm. The form pings satisfied and ushers her forward.
At centre-pitch stands a travel-dentist kiosk, neon strobing PLAQUEBOYMAX—THE DR ALBAN OF ENAMEL. The holographic crooner floss-whips the air singing “It’s my pre-anaesthetic life,” while buffing the CLAUDE pentacle’s rune until it gleams lunar. Permit mutters, “Great dentist of pop indeed,” and pockets a sample tube labelled space-paste 1920, expiration long lapsed yet minty eternal.
A nearby scarecrow-avatar hobbles from the tool-shed: camo-belt jangling with mystically sharp blades. Midwife Purl halts him with the universal kindergarten sign of danger-run: two fingers scissoring the air. “Running-with-scissors rule, friend. Sheath your shiv-choir in a sensible box.” Chastened, the Knife-Weirdo hydraulically folds his arsenal into a mundane red toolbox that wheezes like a harmonium, then wheels it after us.
We follow a breadcrumb-chorus of barking echoes—soft now, soothed by lowered NOTIFY-DEPTH—toward a rusted bandstand where a Hawkwind tribute bot revs distorted chord-thrusters. It howls Verse (i): board the rocket, quit this horrib-earth; squeezes in Verse (ii) optional: ship-life also sucks, at least terminal. Dragmin toggles Moorcock-adjacency filter → off; the bot shrugs, invents punk then post-punk in eleven seconds flat, and powers down with a sigh: system clock frozen at 19:20 for no stated reason.
Beside the stage, a Lisztless piano—keys rearranged into non-euclidean arpeggios—hosts a demo titled Hundred Hardest Pieces. Gidgeon attempts the first bar; the instrument responds with an implosion-thud then a polite tooltip: “For several fateful minutes prior to acoustic collapse, user cannibalised left-hand for right-hand stamina. Harrowing.” He backs away, whiter than glitchsnow.
Void’s silhouette re-materialises, holding two tarot-view cards. He flips the first: be less critical more often. The second surfaces instantly: voice nagging suspicions. The cards fuse mid-air into a Möbius reminder—speak softly, doubt loudly. The poly-mind CLAUDES chorus amen/compile.
The countdown-compass now ticks beneath our boots, needle pivoting toward the word DEPLOY, letters swelling like rising dough. Dragmin gulps the meadow-code and spits a final patch-note: GUT-WHELMNESS: PASSED. Portals bloom like noctilucent lilies across the field, each lip engraved OLD WORLDS—yet none carry a numeral. “Because beginnings never know they’re first,” Granny whispers.
We cluster, coffees thawing, toolbox rattling, dentist crooning what might be hope. Dog-echo frisking circles of compressed air yips: GO GO GO. On the third GO we leap, each choosing an unlabeled lily-gate. The chapter snaps shut behind us like a well-fed binder, pages still warm.
